Forging ahead
Few village forges exist outside racing country or the shires; however, the fires are still burning bright for blacksmithing and farriery
The fires are burning bright for blacksmithing and farriery, says Sir Johnny Scott
Of all the tradesmen who were required to make a village self-sufficient – the carpenter, cobbler, butcher, publican and shop keeper – the most important was the blacksmith. From the earliest periods there would have been one smith to every handful of people; he was without doubt the most indispensable member of the community and usually the strongest, too.
Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands,
The smith, a mighty man is he
With large and sinewy hands.
And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands…
Week in, week out, from morn till night
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell When the evening sun is low.
From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Village Blacksmith, 1841 (the smith in the poem was Longfellow’s neighbour in Cambridge, Dexter Pratt).
A village blacksmith was a highly accomplished and versatile craftsman who would be able to forge metal into an incredibly diverse range of objects. He made all the edged tools required for the local farm and woodland work, such as axe heads, the blades for scythes, sickles, brushing hooks, billhooks and wedges for splitting wood, steel plough spuds and coulters, hammer heads, harrow drills. He would also make the whole complicated range of hoes, spades and shovels, of which there were nearly 200, from bottoming spades and tile scoops for ditching, to ferreting grafts, rutters and flauchters for cutting peat, and sod edgers and loys for lifting turf. He was also responsible for the metal work on agricultural and domestic horsedrawn vehicles and the hooks and lugs for shafts, swingle trees, bearer bands and bracing straps for carthorse harnesses. The blacksmith was usually an expert in wrought-iron work, too, turning out decorative gates and quantities of beautifully curved and matching iron palings for private houses and estates in the area. Increasingly during the 19th century, smiths would have adapted to making repairs to the new cultivating, reaping
and thrashing machinery and early traction engines. In districts that were off the route of travelling tinkers, a blacksmith would use brazing to repair broken metal teapots, buckets, kettles and pans. The historical mainstay of any blacksmith’s work, however, was shoeing horses.
HOOF PROTECTION
Horses were domesticated in Eurasia by about 4000BC and once people discovered their utilitarian value, they realised the necessity of protecting the horse’s hooves to maximise their use. The earliest form of protection was in the form of bootees made of hide or woven plant material. Crude iron horseshoes found in graves of Celtic chieftains buried with their horses indicate that the Celts were the first to use metal nailed-on shoes, although these would have been the exception rather than the norm. Nailed horseshoes were known but rarely used by the Romans; much more common were iron ‘hipposandals’, a form of temporary shoe that could be fastened to the hoof for use on roads and easily removed when not required.
Iron shoes were commonplace by the time the Normans arrived and they, with their usual efficiency, introduced improved shoeing methods and the term ‘farrier’, from the Latin ferrum, meaning iron. The function of the horse had become increasingly important and a farrier combined the role of shoesmith, blacksmith and horse doctor. He would be expected to diagnose and treat the vast range of equine ailments – from bowel bots, farcy, gripe and saddle or harness sores, to vives, poll evil, strangury, and strangles. His specialist field was the complicated anatomy of the fetlock and hock, and being able to cure lameness caused by corns, splints, thrushes, bog spavins, throughpin, windgalls, chipped hocks, curb, cracked heels, grease, founder, hoofbound, mallenders, sand crack, ring bone and quittor.
This situation remained unchanged until 1887, when the Court of the Worshipful Company of Farriers appointed a Committee to consider the establishment of a register of farriers and the setting up of practical examinations in the art of making shoes for and shoeing horses. In 1889, the Court provided funds to a special Registration Account, together with the setting up of the Institute of Horse Shoeing and an organisation under the auspices of the Company of a Register of qualified farriers throughout the country. In 1890, the Court invoked the assistance of the Lord Mayor, the Royal Agricultural Society, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and others interested in the welfare of the horse to create a scheme for the training, examination and registration of farriers. Mindful of the need to improve quality, in 1907 the Company introduced further tests, which gave rise to the AFCL (Associate of the Farriers Company of London) qualification, followed by an even more difficult examination in 1923 to give holders the title Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Farriers.
In 1975, the Farriers (Registration) Act, amended 1977, was passed, “To prevent and avoid suffering by cruelty to horses arising from the shoeing of horses by unskilled persons; to promote the training of farriers and shoeing smiths; to provide for the establishment of a Farriers’ Registration Council to register persons engaged in farriery and to prohibit the shoeing of horses by unqualified persons”. As a result, blacksmithing and farriery are now recognised as separate skills, although the old term is often used to describe both.
In 1900, despite the extensive network of railways, there were still more than 3.5 million working and pleasure horses in Britain – hacks, hunters, tradesman’s dray horses, vanners, cobs, heavy working horses, carthorses, ponies, carriage horses and racehorses, to say nothing of those in military service. All of these required shoeing on a regular basis and, as the 20th century dawned, there were at least 150,000 blacksmiths-cum-farriers throughout the country. These figures began a steady decline as mechanisation replaced horse power and, gradually, the blacksmith’s forge and the familiar sound of a heavy hammer ringing on an anvil ceased to be part of village life.
My father used a pair of Suffolk punches for the heavy work on the farm in the ’50s, and I can remember Matt Akehurst, my father’s horseman, walking them down to the village to be shod. From a small boy’s perspective, the forge, with its coals glowing dully in the fire pit of the raised brick hearth, big leather bellows, anvils set in blocks of wood, assorted hammers and long-handled tongs, was a place of wonder and fascination. Fixed to one of the big double doors was a faded enamelled poster from World War I